Clean Air: Race and Place Matter

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By Elsa Batista, Moms Clean Air Force

As a contractor, I am a jack of all trades: I write, moderate an online community and translate, usually from English to Spanish. Most recently, a friend and I translated a 110-page document released by PolicyLink and The California Endowment called, “Why Place and Race Matter.”

Our jaws were on the ground upon reading the report. “¡Que fuerte!” my friend Xochitl blurted out after we translated yet another horrifying statistic.

Basically, through case studies and data, PolicyLink and The California Endowment found that low-income communities and communities of color in California – and oftentimes, nationally as well – are more likely than any other group to suffer the poorest health outcomes – no matter how responsible they were as individuals. These statistics, especially, blew us away:

An African American with a PhD. earning a six-figure salary, on average, lives 15 years less than the Caucasian professional with a PhD.

An African American mother with a college education is more likely to have a baby die in infancy than the baby of a Caucasian mother with no high school diploma.

Even African Americans in economically distressed neighborhoods who ate well and exercised – in spite of the odds – still suffered worse health outcomes than their more affluent and Caucasian counterparts.

Nationally, African Americans and Latinos were two to nine times as likely as Caucasians to receive subprime or other high-risk home loans.

The report made clear that race matters when it comes to health outcomes, but also where we live. I was appalled at how neighborhoods with large minority populations are still the dumping grounds for dirty air and water, as well as toxic waste dumps.

Many African Americans, for example, live in areas where there are a disproportionate number of highways, bus depots and airports. From the report:

“The predominantly black community of West Oakland (California), for example, sits against a busy freeway, a major port, and an airport. A 2005 study found the air inside some homes was five times more toxic than in other parts of the city. Years of research have shown that air pollution can trigger the wheezing, coughing, and gasping for breath that signal an attack in people with asthma, but a study of 10 California cities raises the even more troubling possibility that pollution can lead to the onset of the disease. The study found that the closer children live to a freeway, the more likely they are to develop asthma.”

That made interesting reading. In Vancouver and in Squamish. BC, housing for seniors is also situated near very busy traffic, bus routes, noise and particulate pollution. Now I know how the municipal authorities regard our wellbeing, or not!

That made interesting reading. In Vancouver and in Squamish. BC, housing for seniors is also situated near very busy traffic, bus routes, noise and particulate pollution. Now I know how the municipal authorities regard our wellbeing, or not!